The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for compressing DNA samples for DNA sequencing.
The aim of the proposed method for in-capillary densification of the DNA analyte is to obtain a very sharp compressed DNA samples which can be separated in shorter separation times and experience less diffusion. Therefore, a need exist for a new technique which has higher sensitivity and better resolution than the conventional state-of-the-art techniques. This will moreover allow us to extend the range of the separation to larger DNA fragments.
Notably, the new technique will be less expensive. Indeed, since in the ESC method the injected DNA sample will be compressed into a narrow zone, the injection time is not limited to rather short few seconds interval, but can be extended to several minutes. This means that the method will allow to use low-concentration DNA samples and minimize the waste of costly DNA material. The intensity of the excited fluorescent radiation from the condensed DNA sample will be strongly enhanced. This in turn will allow us to use low-intensity illumination sources in the detection module of our DNA sequencing instrument which will reduce the cost and expand the versatility of the sequencing instruments.
In the present section we provide a short review of the state-of-the-art of densification techniques in the DNA capillary electrophoresis (CE) of and discuss our motivation to develop a new method, for the DNA sequencing industry.